[Solar-general] Fw: [hipatia] Fw: Laurels for Giving the Internet Its Language

Mie Feb 16 19:24:03 CET 2005

>From the New York Times --
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/16/technology/16internet.html

Laurels for Giving the Internet Its Language
By KATIE HAFNER

Late in the summer of 1973, two young scientists in the nascent
field of computer networks hunkered down in a conference room of
the Cabana Hyatt Hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., a clean but bland
stopping place for salesmen and the parents of students at nearby
Stanford University. Their goal was to thrash out a way to make
different, isolated computer networks talk to each other.

They wrote, they sketched, they argued, all the while passing a
yellow legal pad back and forth to capture ideas as they
crystallized.

When they emerged two days later, they knew they had the makings
of a solid technical paper. What they did not know was that they
had created the essential underpinnings of today's vast and
sprawling Internet.

For the work that began on that yellow pad, the Association for
Computing Machinery plans to announce Wednesday that Vinton G.
Cerf and Robert E. Kahn will receive the 2004 A. M. Turing Award,
widely considered to be the computing field's equivalent of the
Nobel Prize.

Nearly a billion people have come to rely on the Internet as they
do on a light switch. Very few know how it works, to say nothing
of how it got here. A 10-year-old might think Google, Microsoft
or perhaps Al Gore invented the Internet.

In honoring Dr. Kahn and Dr. Cerf, the computing association
validates one view in the highest ranks of computer science that
their work made the Internet possible. It also revives the public
spats in the small community of Internet founding fathers over
who should be considered the Edison of this age.

"A lot of people are responsible for the success of the
Internet," said David Patterson, a professor of computer science
at the University of California, Berkeley, who is president of
the association. "Vint and Bob are responsible for the vocabulary
of the Internet."

With that first generation of pioneers now graying, researchers
and archivists are pondering the birth of the Internet in
historic terms. That old yellow pad, if it had not been lost
decades ago, would be a valuable collector's item now.

In fact, a first edition of the technical journal in which the
Cerf-Kahn paper, "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection,"
appeared is being auctioned at Christie's next Wednesday as part
of a larger sale of computer-science papers being sold by a
collector in Novato, Calif. The journal is expected to sell for
$2,000 to $3,000.

In that early brainstorming session, Dr. Kahn, 66, and Dr. Cerf,
61, who are known in the computing field for their
Watson-and-Crick-like teamwork, created the structure for
Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, a
set of communications standards that enable different computer
networks to share information, giving the Internet its power and
reach.

Dr. Patterson said his association was careful to word the award
citation so that it was clear that Dr. Cerf, now senior vice
president of technology strategy at MCI, and Dr. Kahn, chief
executive of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a
nonprofit research and development organization in Reston, Va.,
were being honored for their work on the Internet protocol, not
the Internet as a whole, so as not to rile other claimants to the
Internet's creation. Still, this is the first time in the 39-year
history of the award that it has been conferred for work in
computer networking - the key to enabling global data
communications.

For computers to exchange digital data like Web pages, e-mail and
digital movies, they have to agree on a method for communicating
with each other. The Kahn-Cerf Transmission Control Protocol
defines a standard way to package chunks of data into
"datagrams," for sending across the network.

The Internet Protocol provides a standard way of putting those
datagrams into envelopes addressed to any computer in the world.
Like postal sorters, the computers along the way can look at the
addresses on the envelopes to relay them to their destinations
without needing to look inside the envelopes.

No one disputes that Dr. Kahn and Dr. Cerf created the original
protocol, but factions in computer science point to different
inventions as being most vital to the Internet's existence.

Most notably, for the last 10 years, Leonard Kleinrock, a
computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles,
has been laying claim to having invented packet switching, the
general method of splitting up a message into digital packets,
routing the packets individually and reassembling the message on
the other end.

Until Dr. Kleinrock began making his case prominently, two
others, Paul Baran and Donald W. Davies, had been widely
recognized as packet switching's inventors. Dr. Davies died in
2000.

In recent years, Lawrence G. Roberts, who in the late 1960's
designed the Arpanet, a precursor of the Internet, has been a
supporter of Dr. Kleinrock's claim.

Dr. Cerf, who was a graduate student working in Dr. Kleinrock's
lab at U.C.L.A. when the first Arpanet link was installed there
in 1969, is aware of the egos involved in this debate over
legacy. He said he hoped the announcement of the Turing Award
would not rankle colleagues.

"Especially Larry and Len," he said. "They truly believe that
their work was so integral to the Internet that every time Bob
and I are mentioned they think they should get mentioned."

This is not the first time Dr. Kahn and Dr. Cerf have been
singled out. In 1997 they were awarded the National Medal of
Technology. In 2001, Dr. Cerf, Dr. Kahn, Dr. Kleinrock and Dr.
Roberts shared the Charles Stark Draper Prize for the development
of the Internet.

But the addition of the Turing Award to the trophy case could be
a sensitive subject. "This will probably be troublesome," Dr.
Cerf said. "But I hope not."

Dr. Kleinrock, when informed of this year's award, said: "These
awards are given on whatever measures and criteria the committees
determine. There's plenty of credit to go around."

Dr. Cerf and Dr. Kahn, who were informed of the award last week,
will divide the $100,000 prize, which is named for Alan Mathison
Turing, the British mathematician and cryptographer who broke
German codes during World War II.

The two, who have collaborated on and off for more than three
decades, have different styles. Dr. Cerf, a bon vivant who
usually wears a three-piece suit, is known for his good-natured
pragmatism. Dr. Kahn is more intense.

"Every meeting with Bob is like a Ph.D. oral qualifying exam,"
said David L. Tennenhouse, director of research at Intel, which
sponsors the award. Dr. Kahn, he said, "will drill down on you"
to uncover "inconsistencies in what you're saying."

Yet both men are known for their wry senses of humor. "Maybe it's
the humor that kept them together," Dr. Tennenhouse said.

They first met in 1969 at U.C.L.A., after the first Arpanet nodes
were installed around the country. Dr. Kahn, then working at
Bolt, Beranek & Newman, an engineering firm, in Cambridge, Mass.,
spent time at U.C.L.A. conducting experiments on the new network.

Since then, the two men have been intellectually "bound at the
hip," seldom straying far from computer networking.

In 1973, when they wrote the paper outlining their idea, Dr. Cerf
had just joined the faculty at Stanford University and Dr. Kahn
had moved to the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Defense
Department, which had funded the original Arpanet.

Dr. Kahn said Dr. Cerf took the first crack at writing the
specifications for the protocol.

"After five or seven minutes, he said, 'I'm not sure where to
start,' " Dr. Kahn recalled.

"I said, 'Look, why don't you give me the pen,' and I wrote the
first 10 pages," Dr. Kahn said. "Then he said, 'Why don't you
give me the pen,' and he went from there."

To determine whose name would appear first on the paper, they
tossed a coin, and Dr. Cerf won.

Dr. Cerf's secretary typed up the paper from the original notes,
which have long since disappeared.

"Vint never instructed her about what to do so she probably just
threw that yellow pad out," Dr. Kahn said, with some remorse.

Dr. Cerf said part of the reason their protocols took hold
quickly and widely was that he and Dr. Kahn made no intellectual
property claims to their invention. They made no money from it,
though it did help their careers. "It was an open standard that
we would allow anyone to have access to without any constraints,"
he said.

Dr. Cerf said he was "pretty amazed" by what the Internet had
become. He was quick to add, "I suppose anyone who worked on the
railroad, or power generation and distribution, would have
similar feelings about how amazing it is after you create
infrastructure."

Dr. Cerf is also quite realistic about the recognition his
contribution deserves. Creating a tool is one thing, he said, but
credit for what people do with it is something no inventor can
claim.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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---

    The current wrangle over who invented the Internet was due to
the way ARPA managed the original networking research.  They
treated everyone who participated on the early efforts as central
to the final result.  Every research project was needed and was
integrated into the whole, thus no one part could be said to have
been the most important.  History shouldn't look on this as who
was most important, or who was the creator of the Internet, but
should rather recognize the masterful management that ARPA used
to orchestrate the entire endeavor.  The current DARPA could not
do so now.

    That being said, congratulations to Vint & Bob for their
richly deserved  2004 ACM Turing Award for their watershed work
on tcp/ip.

-- 
Diego Saravia 
dsa en unsa.edu.ar
ar